In League with Dragons (OPEN)

[tempingforatlas]

Who: Gudako and you!
When: 3/28
Warnings: Spooky magic.

One morning, a few days before Spring "break" ends, a note is taped to the front of the class 2-A classroom.

Magic ritual in progress. Please be careful!
-Ritsuka

While on the face of it this may seem ridiculous, peering in through the windows sees all of the desks inside the classroom shoved into the corners while Ritsuka kneels on the floor, having laid the chalkboard on the floor to sketch some kind of elaborate magic circle on it.

Ritsuka frequently pauses, looks at her work, narrows her eyes, erases, resketches, repeats this process, and-

Flops back on her back and lets out a loud groan, just... laying there. Staring up at the ceiling blankly.

It doesn't look like she's going to move for a while.

Maybe someone should go and check up on her.

Comments

[tempingforatlas]

"If you met a big slab of blond, chauvinist beefcake on the way here, he's living proof. He's a Saber-class Servant, Gawain."

(The moment Ritsuka finds out that it was sheer coincidence Gawain showed up when he did she is going to die of embarrassment.)

Ritsuka gets to her feet, smiling and extending her hand. "That's right! Ritsuka Fujimaru, Cause-ranked mage of the Clock Tower. Nice to meet you too."

[sunstead]

And there's a fine example of why he's thrilled to be doing his own introductions... well, at least he'll meet Gawain himself soon enough. He accepts the handshake after only a slight pause.

"A mage from Clock Tower, huh? ... Hmm, nope! Never heard of it," is his cheerful reply. "Though I guess that might be intentional. Can't say I know what a saber-class servant or a cause-rank is supposed to be, either, but it looks like you know what you're doing. I don't know how much help a magitech expert would be, but I do have some experience with handling spirits, if that might be what you're working with?"

He's thinking of a very different kind of spirit, but hey, he's trying.

seems more fitting without internal monologue

[tempingforatlas]

"Oh, I have no idea what I'm doing, just to be clear. A Cause is just about the lowest rank you can get while still being officially recognized by the Mage's Association. I'm just about the worst mage alive, really!"

1/2 im crying ritsuka pls

[sunstead]

"You..."

2/2

[sunstead]

"If you don't know what you're doing, why are you trying to perform such a complicated spell?! Are you trying to get yourself killed?! Summoning is an incredibly delicate art, you can't just mess around with that kind of thing and hope for the best! It could blow up in your face, or worse, you could summon something you don't have the power to control! Do you know how many mages die every year from mismanaged summoning rituals?!"

He had faith in her, he really did... but no, now it's straight to the Scold Zone. Not that he's even remotely qualified to chastise her about the dangers of summoning, but still.

Clamor rubs the side of his face with a hand and sighs loudly. Just when he was about to think they had a chance...

"Right. How about you start by explaining what you do know about this ritual." Maybe... he can figure it out... or at least try to fix any disastrous mistakes before they happen.

EXPOSITION DUMP

[tempingforatlas]

"What I mean by that is that the summoning ritual is the only thing I can do. It takes me a solid twenty seconds to charge up enough energy to cast a single gandr, but I'm like catnip to these guys for some reason."

Malicious plans hate her! Evil beings keep on falling in love with this six-piece chicken McNobody for absolutely no reason!

"Well, the Heroic Spirit Summoning ritual is... really complicated." Ritsuka sighs, rubbing her chin as she fumbles for a way to explain. "The basic idea is that whenever someone makes enough of an impression on our history, they get recorded in this place called the Throne of Heroes as Heroic Spirits. You can't actually summon the Heroic Spirits themselves, but you copy off small parts of them by calling on one piece of their story. Like, take Gawain, the guy I summoned. He's a pretty legendary knight, so he'd probably be qualified for the Rider class on the basis of, you know, horse. But the more prominent aspect of him is the fact he was really good with a sword, so I summoned him under the Saber class instead.

"The history of the ritual is a little bit wonky. Originally, it was made to fight these things called Beasts, the Seven Evils of Humanity. Beasts are really nasty and tough to deal with as a rule. I've tangoed with two mature ones, Beast I and Beast II, and it took everything I had and then some to beat them. Getting rid of Beast II was basically nothing but pure luck, honestly, and it managed to destroy most of Mesopotamia before we were able to trap it in Kur so it wasn't immortal anymore. Hell, Beast I even destroyed the entire world at every moment in time successfully, and I got roped into all this... mage stuff because there was literally nobody else alive with the right genes to try and save it. Even immature ones, like Beast III/L that we managed to nip off at the bud, are massive pains to deal with.

"So the ritual was originally way more powerful than the one I'm using since it summoned seven Grand Servants to beat them instead of normal Servants. If most Heroic Spirits are normal heroes, Grand Servants are the ideals of one of the classes personified. Like, Grand Assassin is the closest anyone's come to becoming actual Death as a human being, and Grand Caster's corpse was powerful enough to kickstart that whole ending-the-world-thing.

"But mages got greedy, as mages do, and decided that they wanted to shortcut a way to omnipotence by co-opting the ritual into something else. They modified it to summon less obscenely powerful Servants and bind them to specific Masters, all to compete in something called the Holy Grail War, with the grail powering the ritual. Whoever gets the grail gets to make a wish. Hypothetically. It has literally never actually worked out that way in any timeline that I've visited. And the version I use, the FATE system, is meant to summoning a lot of Servants individual of the Holy Grail. It's automated back in Chaldea, but I've seen it work enough times to know how to at least draw the circle and do the chant correctly, and I'm pretty decent at negotiating with Servants so everything after that shouldn't have been much of a problem.

"That answer all your questions?"

...Ritsuka cannot be more than nineteen years old.